Steam client causing 100% utilisation of GPU on animated screens

[WiteTaurian]

Hello Manjaro community, thank you for reading my post,

This is a bit on one of them that do not happen very often but am struggling to find solution for it. Any help on this would be really appreciated. so my system is as follows. . .
MB: Asus x99-A
RAM: 4GB hyperx predator @ 2133mhz x4 = (16GB Total)
CPU: Intel(R) Core™ i7-5960X CPU @ 3.00GHz
PSU: 650W Corsair RM650X
GPU: Saphier AMD RX Vega 64
Display drivers: Open source AMDGPU
Operating System: Manjaro Linux
KDE Plasma Version: 5.26.5
KDE Frameworks Version: 5.102.0
Qt Version: 5.15.8
Kernel Version: 6.1.11-1-MANJARO (64-bit)
Graphics Platform: X11

The symptom is as the title says, every time i bring the steam app up, the GPU runs at 100% utilisation then if i scroll down to a part where there is no animated screens the utilisation drops to 0, or if i am on the library and are downloading something just because of the the animated progress bar on the left the GPU utilisation shoots to 75% ish, if i minimise steam to the taskbar the GPU drops to 0 once again. i really cant imagine that a vega 64 is struggling to display animated screens on steam as during game it performs as it should, FPS is where is should be and is stable. But this issue is causing serious slow down and running up the temp on the GPU every time it happens naturally when i am browsing the store.

My first thought is the video accelerator api but im not sure. this is a few screen shots of what i mean, by the way CPU usage is zero but you be able to see that on there using nvtop.

then if i minimise

it stops using resources and then if its on steam with a static screen it goes to zero utilisation naturally as well

its almost like the vega 64 resources are not correctly being used or are being using in a very inefficient manor, i understand the Video accelerator api is used to offload the resources from the cpu to the gpu which looks like is happening but it still does not explain why the vega 64 needs to use all its might to display a few animations.

I was wondering if anyone had come across this issue before with any setup or knows how to diagnose it. Any help on this is once again very much appreciated.

Kind regards
taurian

[WiteTaurian]

Hello Manjaro community,

Good news, for anyone that might find this information of some use i have now solved the issue. I have discovered this was a steam native app issue only and it seems i found a setting in Steam > Settings > Interface > 3rd category, kind of a noob move not going through these thoroughly but i Unticked the option that says “Enable GPU accelerated rendering for web views” then restarted the app. After scrolling through and using the store it performs seamlessly, i checked nvtop to see my GPU utilisation drop by about 30 to 50% however the resources are still being used by the GPU but this is to be expected. This means from what i understand is that the the Graphics card API is doing what is should. . .

(In my case Intels and Nvidias open source implementation of APIs i have both library’s installed including 32 bit versions (VA-API & VDPAU) which is the only open source ones that my GPU driver support which is amdgpu that i know about and iv’e checked that they are working anyway. . .)

and supplementing the workload from the CPU to the GPU but i assume whatever steam tries to do when checking this box tries to offload more than it needs to, i guess this option is probably better may be for people with laptops and may be lower end systems hence why it works fine on my laptop but not this desktop type of build with a Vega 64,

Anywho its fixed now so thanks for reading this far lol.